Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical Hamilton is obviously political in nature, because it’s literally about politics, but Miranda and other people working on the show have occasionally used it as a political platform over the years—like when Mike Pence somehow got tickets in 2016 and listened as the cast made…

A lot of things in the world are bad right now (some would say “most things”), and Run The Jewels’ El-P has decided to do what he can to make people feel a little better, announcing on Instagram that the duo’s next album will be available “for FREE for ANYONE who wants some music.” The album, Run The Jewels 4, will be…

You know a movement has reached a tipping point when it becomes smarter for businesses to embrace it than to ignore it, which is what happened on Saturday when multiple big media companies and streaming platforms tweeted out messages of support for Black Lives Matter. Of course, businesses aren’t people and it would…

The streets of cities across the country last night were filled with demonstrators rallying together to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 (while police officers apparently drove vehicles into crowds of them), and though a number of celebrities already used their social media platforms to speak…

Look, we’ll be honest: We gave Elon Musk’s SpaceX a bit of a rough time yesterday, after a public test of one of the company’s prototype rocket engines turned into a very public display of extremely expensive fireworks. But, credit where it’s due, the company managed to help two astronauts achieve a dream that’s been…

One more knock-on effect (out of god knows how many) of the COVID-19 shutdowns in Hollywood: Disrupting a perfectly good TV character send-off. That’s the case, apparently, for actress Cush Jumbo and her The Good Fight character Lucca Quinn, with Jumbo announcing this week that she’s departing the CBS All Access…

Trying and failing to come up with a single worse person to be in charge of steering the country through yet another eruption of protests after the caught-on-video murder of an unarmed black person by a white police officer, Jimmy Kimmel frustratedly asked his viewers of Donald Trump, “Is this who you want leading…

America finds itself in a state of well-earned unrest tonight, as people outraged by the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd—which occurred on May 25, 2020, roughly 8 minutes and 45 seconds after police officer Derek Chauvin began kneeling on his neck—continued streaming onto the pandemic-shuttered streets of a…

Roughly a week after Universal Studios Orlando announced its own plans to re-open later this summer—alongside a blunt reminder that there’s no amount of hand-washing, temperature-checking, and line-avoiding that can totally negate the COVID-19 risk imposed by cramming thousands of people together in a theme park on a…

We’ve given—rightly—a lot of crap to Universal’s various attempts to modernize its classic monster properties over the last few years, as the studio desperately tried to flail its way into an MCU-style mega-franchise with Tom Cruise, Mummy Hunter somehow occupying the Iron Man role. Cruise aside, though, we have to…

Today, in news that doesn’t do much to assuage our bone-deep certainty that Tom Cruise is going to die up there: Elon Musk’s SpaceX suffered another one of those high-impact oopsies that have become part of its stock in trade of late. Per TechCrunch, today’s pyrotechnic whoopsiedoodle involved a static fire test for…

Last week, Primer and Upstream Color auteur Shane Carruth gave an incendiary interview to Indiewire in which he doubled down on his long-standing critiques of the studio system and asserted that he is “not in the same business as Hollywood.”

Turns out burning down your home gym gives you lots of time to wax nostalgic about the best era of bubblegum pop music. With her second album, Ooops!...I Did It Again, recently 20 years old, Britney Spears (and totally not her publicity team) has released an Apple Music playlist of turn-of-the-century tunes that will…

Jeffrey Katzenberg was right about one thing: A whole bunch of shit has gone down in the world since Quibi was first announced in October of 2018. Katzenberg blames the COVID-19 pandemic for the big fat bellyflop with which his and CEO Meg Whitman’s $1.8 billion dollar experiment has landed with viewers, but—although…

The world has a lot on its plate already, which is why we’re sorry to spike your blood pressure with news that a bunch of monkeys recently managed to steal three COVID-19 test samples. The good side of all of this is that the samples are now back in human hands and we’re in no danger of an Outbreak situation; the bad…

Erle Stanley Gardner published his first Perry Mason story in 1933, brought the character to TV in 1957, and saw variations of the daring criminal defense attorney unfold in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Now, HBO is reviving the character for a new series with The Americans’ Matthew Rhys at the helm. Today, the network…

Some of us do puzzles. Some of us do crosswords. And one of us—podcaster and MCU fan Tony Goldmark, specifically—thought to keep his quarantined brain active by painstakingly assembling the chronology of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, scene-by-scene.

As protests against the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on Monday continue to build in the city and around the nation, an Afro-Latino CNN reporter who was arrested on live TV early this morning has been released from custody. The arrest took place at 5:09 a.m. local time, as Omar Jimenez…

Second Life, the online game where people get together to role-play alternate digital lives, has long maintained a fully-functioning economy that players use to generate both virtual and real-world money. Naturally, because of this, its audience has replicated just about every aspect of our actual markets, including…